


The French Girl

by fhwdf



Category: Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Genre: Boarding School, Gen, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 20:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10543554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fhwdf/pseuds/fhwdf
Summary: A new student at a girls' boarding school causes disruption as events from her past begin to emerge.





	

The new girl arrived later than expected, in a carriage drawn by two smart horses. Miss Bank and Miss Richardson went to greet her at the front of the house. She stepped down with surprising poise for one still shy of her tenth birthday, drawing aside a handful of blue silk skirts to evade the mud.

            ‘We are so pleased to meet you,’ said Miss Bank, taking the child’s hand. ‘I do hope you will feel at home here.’ They led her to the parlour, where an afternoon tea had been laid out. She was thinner than they might have hoped, and Miss Richardson pressed a slice of lemon cake on her, which was accepted with a pretty, practised smile.

            She was a talkative child, although her English was clumsy and snippets of French crept in when her vocabulary failed her.

            ‘I understand that you had difficulties at your last establishment,’ said Miss Bank.

            ‘Oh, yes. It was awful. They beat me when I forgot the dates of the kings; they fed us stale bread, and not enough of it. And,’ she leaned forward as though pronouncing an obscenity, ‘They would not let me _boucler les cheveux_.’

            Miss Richardson regarded the girl’s precise, burnished ringlets. ‘I can assure you that things will be different here.’

            Miss Bank produced a letter from her pocket and shook it out. ‘Your guardian informs us that your education until now has been adequate, if disjointed. You will continue in all the usual subjects, although I don’t think French lessons will be necessary for the time being. Instead we shall see how you get on with Latin.’

            ‘As a Continental, we imagine rather well,’ added Miss Richardson.

            ‘Ellen will show you to your dormitory now. You will share it with seven other girls.’ Miss Bank stood up and reached for a bell-pull beside the mantelpiece, which she gave a sharp tweak. ‘I hope these arrangements are all to your satisfaction.’

            The child nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes. I don’t like to sleep alone.’

 

She proved a success, though not an unqualified one, in the classroom: quick, spirited, easily distracted. It was clear that she would rather be playing with the troupe of dolls which had arrived with her, eerily realistic things whose every garment might have been sewn out of bank notes. But she had a knack for charming adults, and none of her teachers seemed to mind if she stared out of the window a little too often, twisting a curl around her finger.

            The other girls were not so easily won over. They were envious, presumably, of their new classmate’s splendidly stocked trunks, and awed by her mimicry of adult behaviour: the studied incline of the head, the carefully pitched laugh. At meal times they spoke to her but did not seem at ease. And word got around quickly that she was a difficult sleeper: a damning offence in a shared room in which the bell rang at seven each morning. The little girl suffered from nightmares, the matron explained, and would moan and throw herself about the bed all night when they struck.

            One night the matron was woken by a series of toe-curling screams. When she reached the dormitory the girl was still thrashing and whimpering, while her room-mates looked on wide-eyed.

            ‘ _La femme_ ,’ was all she could make out, and then again, louder. ‘ _La femme!_ ’

            The matron knelt at the head of the bed and shook her, gently at first and then harder when the interruption seemed only to add to her delirium. The girl jerked upright, opened her eyes and looked from wall to wall with a panicked lack of recognition. She began to sob.

            ‘It’s quite all right, dear. It’s all right. You’re safe in your bed.’

            She was breathing fast and heavily. Gradually she focused on the matron’s face. ‘I was burning,’ she said. ‘Everything was burning.’

            ‘Nothing was burning,’ said the matron. ‘You’ve given the other girls quite a fright.’

            ‘She was coming –’

            ‘Who was coming?’

            She gave a little shiver, and with it seemed to recover some of her composure. ‘Nobody. It was a dream. I am sorry for waking you.’

 

‘She’s heard too many ghost stories,’ said Miss Richardson. ‘Perhaps the older girls at her last school told them. It does sound a dreadful place.’

            Miss Bank had a boiled egg for her breakfast. She broke the crown with a precise wrist movement. ‘This can’t be allowed to continue. She woke the entire south wing.’

            Miss Richardson proffered the toast rack and Miss Bank accepted a slice.

‘ _La femme_ ,’ mused Miss Richardson. ‘The woman.’

‘I don’t see why she should be distressed by the thought of a ghost. In my experience, children are usually more afraid of real people.’

Miss Richardson considered this. ‘Yes. An old schoolmistress, perhaps.’

‘Her guardian wrote that he was recently married.’

‘Oh, but his wife came to look around before placing the child here. She seemed a nice woman. Perhaps a little stern, but certainly caring.’

‘The ones who seem nice are often the worst of all.’

In their years as teachers, Miss Bank and Miss Richardson had watched a steady stream of parents rattle through the gates to deposit and collect their daughters. The ones of whom they most approved were those who visited during term time, usually for Sunday lunch and a stroll with their child. It was true that, despite her vast wardrobe and lavish selection of toys, the French girl had received no visitors. It was also true that she had no parents to visit her.

 

Winter arrived suddenly, and with it an infestation of small furry creatures which, upon closer inspection, revealed themselves to be muffs. The south wing slept in relative peace; their classmate’s incident did not repeat itself. And Miss Richardson noticed with satisfaction that the other students’ initial coolness toward the French girl began to thaw, just as the windows were frosting over. Perhaps her night terrors had finally inspired sympathy. Perhaps they had performed the useful service of humanising her to a peer group previously incapacitated by awe. Whatever the reason, several of her dolls were spotted in the hands of other girls, making conversation with her favourite: the one with the tightest curls and the smoothest china skin.

            This lasted for several weeks. Miss Bank and Miss Richardson breathed a joint sigh of relief, as did the matron, who was once more able to sleep through the night. But the matron’s reprieve was short-lived. Soon she was up every night, more than once usually. The new spate of nightmares had struck not the French girl but her classmates, and with a kind of collective hysteria whole roomfuls of girls began to rise at midnight to clamour at the matron’s door.

 

Miss Bank took a knife to the fruit cake on her desk. ‘Can I tempt you?’

            The French girl nodded, smiling her prettiest smile.

            Miss Bank slid a piece onto a small plate and handed it to the girl, then did the same for herself and Miss Richardson. She leaned back and clasped her hands without touching her plate. ‘We are concerned.’

            ‘Oh. Why?’ asked the little girl, with an anxious, solicitous expression.

            Miss Richardson spread her hands on the desk. ‘It has come to our attention that you have been sharing your dolls with the other girls.’

            The girl frowned delicately. ‘Yes. They can play with them as long as they don’t dirty their dresses.’

            ‘We encourage sharing here,’ said Miss Richardson. ‘It speaks to a good disposition in a young lady. But we –’

            ‘We are concerned about the nature of the games you have been playing,’ finished Miss Bank. ‘We are aware that circumstances were quite different at your last school, but here we cannot have our girls terrifying their peers with lurid tales from penny dreadfuls.’

            The smile disappeared from the French girl’s face. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What is a penny dreadful?’

            ‘She means tall tales,’ supplied Miss Richardson. ‘Things which are unsuitable and untrue.’

            ‘But it isn’t untrue.’

            ‘Whoever told you the story meant to scare you. It wasn’t kind of them to tell it to you, but it is only a story. However, if you persist in having your dolls act it out, we shall have to confiscate them.’ Miss Richardson looked pained rather than stern, which seemed to discomfit the girl more effectively. ‘You mustn’t keep upsetting your classmates.’

            There was a short, uneasy silence. The child stared at the floor: ashamed, possibly, and confused. Miss Bank broke off some of her cake with a fork, chewed and swallowed it.

            ‘Where did you hear it, Adela?’

            She raised her head again, frowning deeply now. ‘I didn’t hear it. It happened.’

            Miss Bank sighed. ‘Where did it happen?’

            ‘At my guardian’s house. The house that used to be his before it burned down.’

            ‘Your guardian kept a lunatic in his attic?’ asked Miss Bank.

            ‘Yes. Yes. He kept –’ The girl was becoming visibly more upset, casting her hands about as though hoping for the right words to fall into them. ‘ _Sa femme – il l’a caché dans la mansarde_.’

            Miss Richardson glanced at Miss Bank. ‘ _La femme,_ ’ she said. ‘She doesn’t mean “the woman” at all.’

            ‘Adela,’ said Miss Bank, her tone gentler now, ‘Do you really mean to say that your guardian locked his wife in an attic?’

            The girl burst into tears. Her face flushed and crumpled as the saltwater made runnels down it: she began, for once, to look positively ugly. ‘I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone,’ she choked. ‘But it’s true. It’s true. And she, the madwoman, she comes to me every night with her hands full of fire.’

 

Miss Bank held the letter out so that Miss Richardson could see it too. The script was neat and elegant: a woman’s hand, although the name at the bottom was a man’s. ‘Mr Rochester,’ read Miss Bank. ‘I always felt there was something wrong about the letter. Now I realise that it’s written out by someone else. Because the fire blinded him.’

            ‘Presumably his wife,’ said Miss Richardson, ‘The governess.’

            They stared at the sheet of paper. The characters were uniform, carefully nondescript in the way the things which mask immense secrets always are.

            ‘I don’t like him,’ said Miss Richardson, conclusively.

            ‘Nor I,’ said Miss Bank. ‘But it is our job to protect our girls.’

            Miss Richardson reached for Miss Bank’s free hand and clasped it tightly.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you've found this both enjoyable and plausible! I wanted to explore Adele's reaction to the events of Jane Eyre, because I imagined they'd make growing up difficult for her...
> 
> I am writing a dissertation on Jane Eyre fanfic so any comments will be hugely appreciated.


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